A car full of people pulled into the parking lot of Middendorf’s on Tuesday afternoon and strolled up to the 78-year-old seafood restaurant perched between lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain. Looking around, they spotted the owner, Horst Pfeifer, and asked if the place was open for lunch.

It wasn’t a funny question. But Pfeifer had to laugh.

“I just told them we were closed on Tuesdays,” he said, pausing to shake is head. “I didn’t want to get into all of this.”

“All of this” is an oblique reference to the rapid, back-breaking work Pfeifer and his wife, Karen, have done since Hurricane Isaac dumped a load of lake water into Middendorf’s lower dining room just a week earlier.

The resulting mess — ruined freezers, wrecked walls, buckled floors, damaged decking — portended weeks, maybe months, of hard labor. Pfiefer, a trim man with the upright bearing of a military officer, had little patience for that kind of delay.

Within hours of the storm’s landfall, he assembled a small army of workers, and in just under seven days, they removed, re-insulated, repaired and repainted the flooded wall paneling; rebuilt the deck; hosed the parking lot, ripped up flooring, spruced the landscaping, ordered pounds and pounds of fresh seafood; and even raked a fresh load of white sand into the kids’ outdoor play area.

With the repairs nearly complete this week, the place looked like it could be serving food.

Indeed, Pfiefer plans to fire up the fryers on Wednesday (Sept. 12), throw open the doors and start again dishing out Middendorf’s sliver-thin, ultra-crispy catfish and everything else on its menu.

“After something like this you have to move in only one direction, forward,” Pfeifer said on Thursday as he pulled out a chair and took a seat near the window in the empty dining room. Outside, not a scrap of debris littered the area leading down to the water’s edge, where just days before floodwater was still knee-deep.

“My goal is to open on Wednesday. And we’re going to do it.”

There’s an almost tidal quality to the way that some south Louisiana restaurateurs have learned to rebuild after serious storms. The old, damaged and flooded equipment comes out; new drywall, flooring, paint and coolers come in.

It’s not exactly natural, but it’s become second nature.

Unlike Hurricane Katrina, whose destruction was widespread, Isaac was more choosy, leaving a patchwork of problems in its wake. Some restaurants sustained little to no damage, and were able to open after a quick sweep, mop and restocking of the freezer. Others took heavyweight beatings.

Here’s a look at how three restaurants are pulling the pieces back together.

Friends Coastal Restaurant

Two days before Hurricane Isaac’s landfall, Ryan Richard, the majority owner of Friends in Madisonville, sat down to dinner at the restaurant with his children, his brother and sister-in-law, their family and two other couples.

They took table 80, Richard’s favorite, on the waterfront deck overlooking the Tchefuncte River. The special that night was grilled salmon and a crispy asparagus and potato tart with a lump crabmeat cream sauce.

The meal, the company, the sunset: It was just one of those perfect evenings. “I looked around and thought, ‘You know, this might be the last time for a while that we get to do this,’” he said.

That thought turned out to be prescient.

Friends, a fixture on the Madisonville riverfront for decades, was so badly damaged by Isaac’s storm surge — which reached as high as 6 feet inside the restaurant — that it won’t reopen anytime soon.

“A year,” Richard said, when asked for an estimate on how long it might take. “I hope it’s not that long. But it’s bad.”

The restaurant’s original building was an 1835 cottage that at some point was moved to the riverbank. Over the years, decks and add-ons were dovetailed onto the original, four-room house, increasing the dining capacity and blessing Friends with its postcard view of boats, birds and jet skies bobbing in the Tchefuncte.

The building took on water with Katrina, Gustav and Lee. But Isaac’s powerful surge shifted it on its pilings.

“In 2008, we made a bunch of improvements to the building so it could better take a storm and reopen quickly,” Richard said. “When Lee hit, we were actually able to open up the restaurant in a matter of days after taking water. We just cleaned it out.

“The thing about this storm is that it came up much higher and much faster. It caused the building to shift structurally. It has to be shored up and some significant foundation improvements made.

“There’s a mental thing you go through, trying to clean it up every time, and you worry about the staff and all the people’s lives involved,” he said, shaking his head. “But there’s also an insanity factor of putting the same amount of money in year after year. It doesn’t make sense. We've got to re-build it right.”

As this storm approached, Richard was busy getting the restaurant ready and didn’t have time to move the furniture from the first floor of his house, just blocks from Friends. The inundation ruined a grand piano, furniture, family mementoes, his car and a boat.

A day after Isaac made landfall, Richard launched a jet ski from his front yard and headed to the restaurant to check the damage. That’s when the severity sunk in.

Heading home, he invited his staff over to his dry, second-floor living room. Over bottles of wine, he delivered the bad news.

As the restaurant rebuilds, Richard hopes to keep as many of his staff as possible on the payroll. “My executive chef Travis Cabler is now project manager for the cleanup,” he said, and sous chef Stephanie Jones is doing cleanup work as well.

“My goal is to preserve as much about Friends as possible,” Richard added. “But there is an exciting part of this. When I think about what’s to come, how we can bring it back better and stronger, expand the area for larger parties and receptions and the deck, it’s what makes me excited and hopeful. Friends will be back.”

It was saved by the “angels,” as owner JoAnn Clevenger calls the staff members and friends who helped rescue the myraid paintings that are as much an Upperline trademark as its bowls of duck-andouille gumbo and plates of fried-green-tomato shrimp remoulade.

The story is one of those hurricane tales that Clevenger, a wonderful storyteller, recounts with a lowered voice and an occasional cackle of laughter.

It goes something like this. On Sunday night, two days before Isaac’s landfall, Clevenger, executive chef David Bridges and the staff buttoned up the restaurant after the final dinner service.

They put all the food into large, contractor-grade garbage bags, then put the bags back into the coolers and freezers. If the power failed, they could just pull the bags out and throw them into the trash. No mess, Clevenger says, of the clever idea.

Then they left town, Bridges to Shreveport, and Clevenger to the 107-year-old home she bought in Columbia, Miss., as a “hurricane runaway house” after Katrina.

While the storm parked itself over New Orleans on Tuesday, Upperline office manager Dennis Schnyder was driving around New Orleans on an errand to help a friend.

That’s when he passed Upperline. Spotting the rain pouring through the roof, he called Clevenger, dashed inside and began grabbing paintings off of the walls.

The center and back rooms remained dry and now are the storage area for chairs, tables, oil paintings and papers. On Thursday, a curtain hung between the two spaces, as much to keep the air conditioning in as to keep the dust from the renovation work out. On a table piled high with mail and artwork sat a fresh loaf of banana bread, made by Bridges’ wife.

“The art was damp but it wasn’t saturated,” Clevenger said. “So my friends from Mississippi came in with a trailer and put all the art in it, and just to be safe, we took down anything under glass in here, too. My friend, the art restorer, was concerned it could do some damage.”

Clevenger, Bridges and helpers then got to work pulling down the soggy ceiling tiles.

The repairs should wrap up quickly. Clevenger aims to reopen Upperline on Thursday.

“I’ve been here 30 years,” she said, “and this is the worst thing that’s happened, and really this is not so bad.”

And there’s a silver lining to Isaac’s clouds. While some of the artwork gets reframed, Upperline’s front dining room will see a new rotation of watercolors and oils.

“JoAnn’s got so many pieces that have never been seen stored away upstairs,” Bridges said. “It will be a whole new display.”

Middendorf’s Seafood Restaurant

When it comes to hurricanes, there’s a time to play defense and there’s a time to play offense. The night before Isaac hit, Horst Pfeifer and a friend, Earl Smith, owner of Smith’s Nursery in Ponchatoula, were on defense.

As the forecast showed the storm bearing down on the region, they were building 650 feet of sand berms around the Manchac restaurant.

And then the water came. Fast.

“It was like white-water rapids,” Pfeifer said.

“By 9:30 on Tuesday night, that’s when we knew we had lost the battle. We hauled butt out of there to save our own skin. We barely made it out. There was already water on the road.

“At that point you just have to go home, sleep, say a little prayer and get up the next day and get moving.”

Pfeifer hasn’t stopped since. As soon as the winds died down, he was pumping water out of the property and using fire hoses to spray out the lake debris — his own fire hoses, bought just for this purpose.

“You mean you don’t have fire hoses?” he joked. “You need more than a garden hose for something like this.”

Middendorf’s higher-level dining room and kitchen stayed dry, but the lower dining room and deck took a hit.

Pfeifer, and his wife, Karen, have been steadily making improvements to the property for several years. They raised the kitchen after Hurricane Ike in 2008, and it came through Isaac almost unscathed.

Which is remarkable. Ike flooded the restaurant with 1-1/2 feet of water. “With Isaac we got more than 2 feet higher than that,” he said.

This week, Pfeifer was on a rapid-rebuilding schedule, and by Thursday, things were falling neatly into place. Even the Middendorf souvenir T-shirts were folded in little rolls back near the hostess station.

“There’s no other way to do this,” Pfeifer said. “There’s no time to be frustrated. You just get back to work.”